World News

Trinta anos depois dos debates sobre a Nova Ordem Mundial da Informação e Comunicação (NOMIC), as desigualdades nos fluxos globais de informação permanecem,porém num contexto em que a produção e a circulação são facilitadas pelas novas tecnologias (NTICs). Este trabalho identifica fatores que contribuem para este aparente paradoxo e propõe mudanças na práxis jornalística – particularmente na cobertura internacional – que podem permitir aos países em desenvolvimento alcançar os objetivos pleiteados pela NOMIC.

(fevereiro de 2009)

Após 25 anos do Relatório MacBride e dos debates sobre a Nova Ordem Mundial da Informação e Comunicação (NOMIC), as assimetrias dos fluxos mundiais de informação permanecem praticamente inalteradas. Embora a comunicação em redes e novas tecnologias de mídia tenham aberto um potencial imenso de mudanças na pauta, na edição e na apuração a distância, o noticiário internacional dos jornais diários brasileiros continua, em larga escala, dependente do material fornecido e filtrado por agências de notícias e veículos estrangeiros. Esta pesquisa identifica o impacto desta configuração no discurso midiático, focando na práxis do jornalismo impresso e na dinâmica das agências de notícias, e propõe alternativas à formação de pauta e à apuração no Jornalismo Internacional.

This thesis maps all 110 news agencies that currently belong to sovereign states of the Global South by analyzing their operational structures, placement of correspondents, services, technologies, languages, news topics, relations with the State, and cooperation with and dependency on other news agencies. Instead of being concerned with content, this research is concentrated on the economic dimension of news agency journalism, the institutional networks they form, and the role they play within the Communication-World, the world-system of International Communication. The perspective taken in this research moves away from the transnational news agencies headquartered in the North (Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Kyodo, DPA, EFE, ANSA) and focuses on news agencies based in the peripheries of the world (TASS, Xinhua, Tanjug, TTXVN, Antara, Notimex, Télam, MAP, Bernama, APS, NAN etc.), which practice journalism under precarious and adverse conditions, immersed in the Coloniality of the modern world-system. Firstly, the thesis reconstructs the longue durée history of the international news trade, underlining its intrinsic relationship with the modern-colonial project. Then, by using the theoretical framework of Boyd-Barrett, Mattelart, Wallerstein, and other authors from Political Economy (both International Political Economy and the Political Economy of Communication) and Geographies of Media and by taking a decolonial perspective, it seeks to prove that the key to understanding the current center-periphery media gap in the age of digital convergence is less in information production than it is in information circulation. Therefore, the concept of information-commodity is presented as essential to understanding the dependency of Southern news agencies towards transnational news agencies. In order to achieve this, the thesis establishes an anthology of news agency journalism in five regions of analysis: Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In each region, the strategies of the State to overcome the information dependency inherited from colonial-imperialist order set up by the transnational news agencies since the 19th century shall be emphasized. Finally, the thesis analyzes the data obtained in the survey for the whole Global South, leading to the conclusion that the State is the driving force behind the circulation of information in the global peripheries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, an unprecedent enterprise gathered developing countries in the field of communication: the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (NANAP), a syndicate of national news agencies from nations of then-called Third World, threaded into an international system to exchange news, primarily among what is nowadays known as the South-South axis. The experiment was led by the state agency of Yugoslavia, Tanjug, andwas fostered by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) within the framework of the struggle for redesigning the structures of international communication, known as NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order). During at least its first five years, the Pool meant a pragmatic answer to the Third World calls for a change in foreign news coverage and for opening South-South flows of information in a qualitatively and quantitatively balanced way. Moreover, the very organization and operation schemes of the NANAP were distinguished by de-centralization, pliability and free membership, all features grounded on the principles of Yugoslav self-management socialism and which would prove especially fitting to the production conditions in peripherical societies of capitalism. This thesis investigates the legacy of the non-aligned enterprise in current counter-hegemonical developments hinged on networks and in South-South cooperation for international communication in order to build information systems which are independent from the hegemony of First World news agencies.

Este artigo pretende constituir-se um guia preliminar para eventuais pesquisas que se debrucem sobre o tema, ao oferecer parâmetros de análise, indicar fontes primárias e secundárias, realizar um levantamento bibliográfico preliminar e apresentar uma proposta de periodização histórica para a evolução da Inter brasileira nestes 200 anos. Ao fim, trata-se de fornecer subsídios a demais pesquisadores que se aventurem a reconstituir o percurso traçado pelo Jornalismo Internacional produzido no Brasil e suas especificidades socioeconômicas, tecnológicas, ideológicas, discursivas e pragmáticas.

Ementa, programa e bibliografia da programa da disciplina Jornalismo Internacional ministrada na Faculdade de Comunicação Social da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FCS UERJ) no semestre 2016.2.

Syllabus of the undergraduate course on World News / International Journalism, second semester of 2016, taught at the Faculty of Social Communication, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This study examines the war-reporting industry’s attitude toward news “fixers”—the locally based
contacts who become news employees, by helping foreign reporters translate interviews, build contacts, and navigate the cultural contexts with which correspondents are increasingly unfamiliar in the era of “parachute journalism.” Conducting a critical discourse analysis of 189 articles published in English-language journalism trade publications, the study seeks to answer these research questions:

(1) How do Anglophone editors and reporters understand and value the labor of news fixers working in conflict zones?
(2) How do Anglophone editors and reporters discuss the safety of their news fixers?

Drawing upon the critical frameworks found in the field of global media ethics, the study will suggest that news fixers have the potential to facilitate more complex and productive “global–local exchanges,” which could in turn lead to a global media ethics that is, in the words of Wasserman, “truly dialogic and critical.” Yet, despite the valuable cultural perspective that fixers can bring, a critical discourse analysis shows that these media employees are currently undervaluedand underprotected by the editors and correspondents who hire them.

How does world news coverage differ across countries and source types? This study compares the extent of foreign coverage and the level of inequality in world news from 16 countries in five regions: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, among four types of news websites: International news agencies, national newspapers, broadcast channels, and news aggregators over a period of 2 years between 2013 and 2014. Findings show that western news sites were among the least unequal, while Asian news sites among the most unequal. International news agencies displayed the highest extent of foreign coverage, while news aggregators displayed the lowest. As news aggregators collect and customize news from a variety of local sources, they further perpetuate and even intensify the narrow representation of the world.

The September 11 attacks produced changes in journalism and the lives of the people who practiced it. Foreign reporters felt surrounded by the hate of American colleagues for "the enemy." Americans in combat areas became literal targets of anti-U.S. sentiment. Behind the lines, editors and bureau chiefs scrambled to reorient priorities while feeling the pressure of sending others into danger. Becoming the Story examines the transformation of war reporting in the decade after 9/11. Lindsay Palmer delves into times when print or television correspondents themselves received intense public scrutiny because of an incident associated with the work of war reporting. Such instances include Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder; Bob Woodruff's near-fatal injury in Iraq; the expulsions of Maziar Bahari and Nazila Fathi from Iran in 2009; the sexual assault of Lara Logan; and Marie Colvin's 2012 death in Syria. Merging analysis with in-depth interviews of Woodruff and others, Palmer shows what these events say about how post-9/11 conflicts transformed the day-to-day labor of reporting. But they also illuminate how journalists' work became entangled with issues ranging from digitization processes to unprecedented hostility from all sides to the political logic of the War on Terror.

This article analyzes the Newseum's attention to questions of the international in an attempt to answer two related research questions: (1) how does the Newseum represent the 'world news' story, and (2) how does it represent the world's various journalism industries? In order to answer these questions, the article first reviews the existing scholarly literature on museums and tourism with the goal of clarifying the Newseum's positioning within a larger tradition of engaging (and governing) the museum visitor. The article then provides some background information on the Newseum's creation, shedding light on the very specific sociocultural context that engendered the Newseum – and its view of the 'world'. Finally, the article discusses the author's findings from a site study of the Newseum's 9/11 Memorial Gallery and its Time Warner World News Gallery.

This article examines the unique ways in which the figure of the freelance war
correspondent is entangled within both the material and discursive logic of the digital in
the age of the “war on terror.” Because freelancers increasingly work across media
platforms and without large crews, these media producers are lucrative replacements for
staff correspondents, especially since news organizations can opt out of paying for their
insurance or safety training. Yet, freelancers can also be abused and discarded as soon as
they begin to trouble accepted notions of journalistic authority—authority that is both a
discursive and a political-economic construction. Following this, I offer two case studies
in which a mainstream news network aligns a freelance journalist with the purportedly
more interpretive and subjective space of the digital in order to regain control over the
political narratives engendered by the freelancer’s experience in the war zone.
Ultimately, I argue that these instances reveal the larger ethical poverty of mainstream
news reporting in the digital age.

This is a book about global communication and equity. It comes as the world of media and communication has drastically changed.  The fundamental issues and structures behind digital media remain basically the same as they have been over the past 50 years. Also the communication problems and policy questions raised since the 1970s at the United Nations have not lost their overall relevance, while new perspectives emerged in moving from the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

The main issue of the media world is to which extent the resources for communication – both material and mental – are distributed in a fair and equal way between nations and people. New technologies have brought along many new possibilities, but their potential has far from materialized due to social and economic structures. While “imbalance” as the overall theme since the 1970s has been replaced by “digital divide” in the 2010s, the fundamental question is still equity.

The book begins by offering a broad overview of communication by two eminent scholars. Johan Galtung’s presentation of the triangle State-Capital-Civil Society is a classic in the study of media and society. Majid Tehranian’s examination of communication and democracy suggests an exceptionally powerful historical and visionary perspective.

The rest of the chapters are either updated from the first edition or new chapters that provide up-to-the-moment appraisals of some of the most important socioeconomic and political issues that affect the world of communication currently.

The Appendix provides a complete record of the eleven MacBride Round Tables that were held between 1989 and 1999, a strategic move to carry on the idea of the NWICO in the ecumenical spirit of democratization of communication as advocated by the MacBride Report Many Voices, One World (1980).

This book is meant for the students and scholars of international communication and development, political economy and international relations. It is also a resource for members of governments and NGOs, as well as advocates of human rights and grassroots communication.


PART I
GLOBAL VISIONS

Johan Galtung, the scholar who first introduced the concept of news structure, and then later helped pioneer the notion of center and periphery in international communication and political economy, offers a seminal chapter which argues that all modern societies are built on three pillars: State, Capital and Civil Society. While there has always been communication between State and Civil Society, though often weak and tenuous, the economic sphere seems a law unto itself. There are few communication channels between State and Capital, and none at all between Capital and Civil
Society's condition causing frustration and repression.

The new world disorder is the subject of Majid Tehranian's chapter. A political economist and global communication scholar, Tehranian critiques discourses on the new world order and analyzes the global changes taking place, and their implications for communication and democratization. The chapter offers both historical and visionary insights. All indicators point to the need to strengthen, through dialogue and new means of self-expression, democratic diversity and cultural pluralism of two-thirds of humankind
which hitherto have been objects rather than subjects of history. 

Both of these chapters appeared in the first edition of this book but here they are reproduced as shorter versions.

PART II
MacBRIDE MOVEMENT

The second section is directly devoted to the MacBride movement itself.

Kaarle Nordenstreng, a scholar and activist in the NWICO movement from its beginning, reviews the great media debate, the context of the movement from the important years of the early 1970s on. This chapter is reproduced from the first edition of this book and is updated to cover the developments to the new millennium.

Mustapha Masmoudi, Tunisia’s former Minister of Information, who hosted the 1976 Non-Aligned Symposium on Information where the concept of NWICO was created, sat on the Unesco MacBride Commission in the late 1970s and wrote before his death in 2013 a review of MacBride
Report objectives with parallels to the more recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). His testimony was not included in the first edition.

PART III
PROSPECTIVES AND PERSPECTIVES

The third section takes up some strands in the rope that ties us to the future. Focusing on journalism, Dennis Davis identifies a new role for journalism in postmodern societies, namely, to construct and share culture and provide a bridge between different cultures.

Development journalism is then taken up by Hemant Shaw, who proposes a normative model that would foster emancipation from modernization. These two are edited versions of respective chapters in the first edition.

Wolfgang Kleinwächter finally reviews the history of transborder communication in an original chapter As a member of WGIG and the UN IGF Improvement Working Group I, this chapter offers a some unique perspectives from an Internet governance insider. Kleinwächter also comments on various events and perspectives regarding the continuing leadership debate on the Internet.

PART IV
MACBRIDE LEGACY

The final section of original chapters is devoted to exploring the MacBride legacy as it relates to the present communication milieu. Katharine Sarikakis begins by examining the trajectory of political claims expressed in the
MacBride Report to the current politics of governance of culture, media and communications. She discusses the role of new trans/urban geographies of production/consumption in the construction of communicative landscapes as they are linked to new priorities in global media policy making.

Robin Mansell focuses on Network Neutrality and the nature of Internets, both public and private in the Post-MacBride Era. She calls on the principles of Civil Society to study the social, political and economic implications of a private Internet. She concludes that justice cannot be
achieved if a growing proportion of online activities is “hidden” from public view and participation.

As a capstone chapter, Richard Vincent uses the concept of Justice and examines the evolution of the MacBride movement, the realities of a global governance system of trade agreements and intellectual property laws. A
major conclusion of this chapter is that any hope that Civil Society might play a dominant role in the WSIS process was dashed as it became obvious that most Civil Society agenda items had ultimately become marginalized and the future for many MacBride-inspired principles was uncertain at best.

This article examines some of the cultural differences between news 'fixers' and foreign reporters, focusing specifically on the expectations and experiences of the fixers, rather than the correspondents whose own perspectives have already been fruitfully explored. Drawing upon qualitative, semi-structured interviews I conducted with 21 news fixers, I will answer three research questions: (1) How do fixers understand and value the work they do? (2) How do fixers view the cultural, ethnic, or racial differences that inevitably play into the professional relationships between local news staff and foreign news outlets? (3) How do these cultural differences impact the safety of foreign correspondents and fixers, most especially at sites of conflict? The study ultimately shows that fixers take issue with foreign journalists' lack of background on the countries they visit and with journalists' lack of attention to disparate cultural mores in the newsgathering process. Furthermore, the inattention to cultural difference in the field can endanger the lives of the foreign reporters as well as the lives of the fixers. Local media workers called 'fixers' have long assisted foreign news correspondents in setting up interviews, translating copy, navigating unfamiliar locations, and staying safe in conflict zones. 1 However, this important labor has historically been invisible to the

Mesazhi i parë drejtuar alienëve bëhet 44 vjeçar Pikësynimi i mesazhit është mbi 25 mijë vite dritë larg. Në datën 16 Nëntor 1974, Observatori Aresibo lëshoi një mesazh përshëndetje në drejtim të grupit sferik yjor M13. Të vënë në dosje apo kompozuar nga një grup shkencëtarësh ku përfshiheshin Dr. Frank Drake dhe astronomi Karl Sagan , mesazhi përfshinte informacione mbi Tokën, Sistemin Diellor dhe racën njerëzore. Të ndarë në shtatë seksione, informacioni përfshinte numrat nga një deri në dhjetë, numrat atomikë (Z) të disa prej përbërjeve kryesore kimike, numrin e nukleotideve në ADN, një diagram të Sistremit Diellor dhe një paraqitje grafike të një njeriu, midis të tjerash. Ai transmetua përmes valëve radio të moduluara përnga M13 një-një grumbullim yjor ndodhur 25,000 vjet dritë larg-për të shenjuar rimodelimin e radio teleskopit Arecibo. Për shkak të largësive ekstreme në këtë mes dhe të kohës krejt të madhe që duhen për të ikur aty, mesazhi kishte për qëllim të qe një demonstrim teknik sesa një orvatje serioze për të kontaktuar me alienët Megjithatë, kjo gjë ka përfaqësuar përpjekjen e parë të njerëzimit në synim drejt yjeve.

How does world news coverage differ across countries and source types? This study compares the extent of foreign coverage and the level of inequality in world news from 16 countries in five regions: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, among four types of news websites: International news agencies, national newspapers, broadcast channels, and news aggregators over a period of 2 years between 2013 and 2014. Findings show that western news sites were among the least unequal, while Asian news sites among the most unequal. International news agencies displayed the highest extent of foreign coverage, while news aggregators displayed the lowest. As news aggregators collect and customize news from a variety of local sources, they further perpetuate and even intensify the narrow representation of the world.

Lately, possibilities of producing and spreading news pictures have increased explosively through online media. Concurrently, religion has become increasingly salient in politics and news. Both processes are connected to globalization. This study encompasses globalization, religion and online images and aims to convey how online world news slideshows represent religion, and more particularly how linguistic and visual parts of picture paragraphs are interrelated, as well as related to representations of different religions. Methodologically multimodal analysis and discourse analysis are combined, focusing on composition of images and (dis-)connection of images and texts. Theories on globalization and possibilities and particularities of online news (pictures) and slideshows, frame the analysis. Tendencies to templates for different religions are found. Many religions appear as aesthetic commodities in images, whereas Islam in texts “sells” images of violence/destruction. Image–text relations are thus crucial both in the creation of meaning and of commodities in online news image culture. Two main image–text types are identified: “Religion in text, (potential) violence/destruction/despair in picture” (Islam) and “Spirituality/worshipping/aestheticism” (other religions). The world news slideshows have crucial roles as containers for these polarized image–text types, where they are related to and defined by each other in the genre's (cl)aim to cover the whole world.